Reviewed by Stephen Henighan
[Editor’s note: A Good Man has just come out in paperback; time to read our fall 2011 review]
A writer who dramatizes present-day rural life is a regionalist; the same writer, if he narrates a rural area’s past, can become an author of international significance. Some time in the early 1990s, after he had published two fine books, Homesick (1989) and Things As They Are (1992), that were critical successes but commercial flops, Guy Vanderhaeghe decided not to be a regionalist. Abandoning the present for the past, he launched a trilogy of historical novels about Montana in the 1870s. Most of the action of The Englishman’s Boy (1996), The Last Crossing (2002) and A Good Man (2011) takes place in the United States. Towards the end of each book the characters roam northward into the territories that will become Saskatchewan and Alberta as Vanderhaeghe traces the repercussions of what US history books trumpet as “the winning of the West” on the self-definition of Canada.
The Englishman’s Boy, a transitional work in Vanderhaeghe’s career, made the tensions between past and present explicit by accessing this history through the eyes of a Canadian filmmaker trying to make a movie about the Old West in 1920s Hollywood. Betrayed by American myth-making, Harry Vincent heeds his mother’s call to head back to Saskatoon. He asserts the primacy of his Canadian identity, yet Vanderhaeghe fails to give concrete shape or context to what this identity means in cultural terms. The second novel, The Last Crossing, downplays overt Canadian themes. The most innovative, ambitious and successful book in the trilogy, it is also the most American. Even though we learn at the novel’s conclusion that one of the characters has gone north and founded a successful ranch near Calgary, this is essentially a book about two upper-class brothers from England wandering through 1870s Montana in search of their missing third brother. The Faulknerian rotating narrative voices, each conveying a subjective view of events, make more demands on the reader than is customary in Vanderhaeghe’s fiction. The results are often compelling. The Last Crossing, which won the 2004 CBC Canada Reads derby, enlarged Vanderhaeghe’s international profile. The first printing of the US hardcover was 35,000 copies; in England, The Last Crossing was featured on a BBC-TV program that resembles Canada Reads. The recurring theme of gender ambiguity gave the novel a patina of contemporaneity, freeing it from the patriarchal stereotypes of the Western genre.
The third novel in the trilogy, A Good Man, unfurls its canvas along much of the Canada-U.S. border, from present-day Alberta all the way to Ontario. The formation of Canada is an undercurrent in The Last Crossing, discernible only by implication: to the extent that modern Canadian culture and institutions can be seen as the products of a collision between the overseas extension of Victorian Great Britain and late nineteenth-century United States expansionism. A Good Man, however, puts the political themes at the centre of the narration. The main protagonist, Wesley Case, is a renegade member of an Ottawa political family whose powerful father is an associate of John A. Macdonald. Having become an army officer at his father’s insistence, Case has committed an unnamed shameful act while defending Ontario against a Fenian raid. In an attempt to escape his own conscience, he drifts to Western Canada and then across the Medicine Line into Montana. The other man pulled into the love triangle that propels the novel’s action is also from the Ottawa area. Michael Dunne, a young Irishman who wanders off an Ottawa Valley farm, uses ruthless guile to claw his way up through the rigid class barriers of nineteenth-century Toronto. It is never made clear whether Dunne is an Irish Catholic or an Irish Protestant. At one point he spies on the Fenians for the Government of Canada; later he collaborates with these Catholic Irish-American terrorists who enjoy the support of US industrialists and politicians in their campaign to “liberate” British North America.
Case and Dunne compete for the affections of Ada Tarr, a cosmopolitan New Englander who has been reduced by widowhood to teaching school in Fort Benton, Montana. This boom town on the Missouri River is the fulcrum of each of the novels in the trilogy, yet in A Good Man it acquires greater centrality than in the first two volumes. When the action begins, Custer’s Last Stand has converted Fort Benton into the command post for hunting the Sioux, who have disappeared into the hills after their startling victory at the Little Bighorn. The crushing of Aboriginal civilization proceeds in tandem with the consolidation of the Canada-US border. The Sioux chief, Sitting Bull, leads his people across the Medicine Line into “British” land to escape the Americans. Like the fanatical Fenians, the great prairie warrior makes the mistake of seeing Canada as a colony of the “Old Woman” (Queen Victoria), when it is now an independent country ruled by the unscrupulous “Old Tomorrow” (John A. Macdonald). Vanderhaeghe portrays Macdonald’s decision to starve the Sioux into leaving Canadian territory and accepting humiliating exile on a reservation in the United States as one of the founding acts of the new nation. The love triangle among Case, Dunne and Ada Tarr is engaging, but the depiction of the destruction of Sitting Bull’s dignity is the novel’s most memorable achievement.
A Good Man may be a “literary Western,” in the style of Larry McMurtry or Cormac McCarthy, yet it conforms to genre expectations sufficiently that the love triangle is resolved with violence and gunplay. Vanderhaeghe manages these scenes adequately. Lacking McCarthy’s ability to create visions of terrifying carnage, he approaches violence with a reassuring, CBC-like tone that signals to the reader that everything will work out in the end. Vanderhaeghe’s real strength –arguably a strength more suited to narratives set in the present than to historical fiction– lies in his sensitive portrayals, leavened by irony, of the ways in which people torment and delude themselves over love and sex. The hormonal temperature is not as high, nor as deliciously perverse, in A Good Man as in The Last Crossing. Yet when, three-quarters of the way through the novel, Vanderhaeghe breaks away from the love triangle to deliver the big, set-piece flashback that reveals at last the shameful act committed by Case during the Fenian raid on Ontario, the reader feels distracted and impatient to return to the lovers in Fort Benton.
If Vanderhaeghe’s novels constitute a “border trilogy” (rather than a Fort Benton trilogy), the obvious point of comparison is with Cormac McCarthy’s trilogy about the border between the United States and Mexico. Both trilogies have a middle volume whose title includes the word “crossing”; both adopt a variety of postures concerning the relationship between the cultures that meet at the border. Vanderhaeghe begins where McCarthy ends, with the old cowboy Shorty McAdoo, out of place in the twentieth century, adrift in the Hollywood of the Roaring Twenties. His predicament resembles that of the displaced cowhands of Cities of the Plain (1998), the last book in McCarthy’s trilogy, whom modern society reduces to helpless vagrants. Yet, as is so often the case, the Canadian is wrestling with the problem of consolidating a national culture while the American, in order to say something original, must tear holes in a suffocating imperial mythology. McCarthy’s bilingual cowboys, who speak Spanish as easily as they do English, reflect a contemporary border consciousness. The great Chilean fabulist José Donoso was scathing about the Spanish dialogue in All the Pretty Horses (1992), the first book in McCarthy’s trilogy, denouncing it as a stereotype of Spanish diction that made Hispanics sound simple-minded. Yet, though the utterances in Spanish are short, McCarthy’s grammar is flawless, and sufficient dialogue is left untranslated to pose a challenge to unilingual English readers. McCarthy unravels American stereotypes of savage Mexico by bringing the country’s erudite culture into play. All the Pretty Horses may reinforce images of savagery in its relentless violence, but it also contains a lengthy disquisition on José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (1776-1827), author of the first Latin American novel. Like Vanderhaeghe, McCarthy puts his best book in the middle of the trilogy. The Crossing (1994) exhibits a nuanced treatment of Mexican-U.S. relations. References to Mexican high culture return in the novel’s overt literary allusions to Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955), often judged the greatest modern Mexican novel. McCarthy almost seems to be campaigning for the cataloguing of his own books as subsidiaries of the Latin American literary tradition
Deprived of the creative screen of a language barrier, and confronting a culture infinitely more powerful than his own, Vanderhaeghe faces a task that is more daunting because it is riskier and less easily defined. Where McCarthy campaigns to cross the boundary into another culture’s literary tradition, Vanderhaeghe cannot help but do so. His adoption of the US form of the Western has led most reviewers outside Canada to assume that he is an American. Both McCarthy’s and Vanderhaeghe’s trilogies respond, in different ways, to the drive for continental integration implemented by the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The Englishman’s Boy displays a residual 1970s Canadian nationalism, assertive yet vague about the nature of the cultural difference it is asserting. Harry Vincent’s reawakened Canadian consciousness contrasts with the ways in which the Aboriginal people divide up the world. At the novel’s close, Vanderhaeghe writes of Strong Bull: “All the country between the Missouri and the Saskatchewan was contained in his mind.” Where white people see a border, the Aboriginals experience a continuity. The hybridized characters of The Last Crossing, such as the half-Scottish half-Blackfoot guide Jerry Potts and Simon Gaunt, the Englishman who discovers that Aboriginal culture can accommodate his twin-spirited nature better than that of the Europeans, swing the ideological weathervane of Vanderhaeghe’s project. In A Good Man, the theme of the consolidation of Canadian nationhood, as the Medicine Line becomes an international border, persists; yet the ways in which this carving-out of nation states annihilates Aboriginal civilization emerges as the trilogy’s central thematic arc. The United States and Canada are distinguished only by their divergent approaches to crushing the Sioux and the Blackfoot. The Americans are frankly genocidal, while the Canadians, as one might expect, shroud their passive-aggressive nature beneath a pose of political rectitude. United by the history of destroying the original peoples of their land, these cultures converge. A Good Man concludes with a marriage between a Canadian and an American, and with the Canadian failing to understand a question asked of him by the defeated Sitting Bull. Having launched his career as a regionalist and started his border trilogy as a nationalist, Vanderhaeghe signs off on the final novel of the series with a subdued, ironic recognition of the triumph of continentalism.
McClelland & Stewart | 480 pages | $32.99 | cloth | ISBN #978-0771087400
‘A Good Man’ by Guy Vanderhaeghe
Book Reviews
[Editor’s note: A Good Man has just come out in paperback; time to read our fall 2011 review]
A writer who dramatizes present-day rural life is a regionalist; the same writer, if he narrates a rural area’s past, can become an author of international significance. Some time in the early 1990s, after he had published two fine books, Homesick (1989) and Things As They Are (1992), that were critical successes but commercial flops, Guy Vanderhaeghe decided not to be a regionalist. Abandoning the present for the past, he launched a trilogy of historical novels about Montana in the 1870s. Most of the action of The Englishman’s Boy (1996), The Last Crossing (2002) and A Good Man (2011) takes place in the United States. Towards the end of each book the characters roam northward into the territories that will become Saskatchewan and Alberta as Vanderhaeghe traces the repercussions of what US history books trumpet as “the winning of the West” on the self-definition of Canada.
The Englishman’s Boy, a transitional work in Vanderhaeghe’s career, made the tensions between past and present explicit by accessing this history through the eyes of a Canadian filmmaker trying to make a movie about the Old West in 1920s Hollywood. Betrayed by American myth-making, Harry Vincent heeds his mother’s call to head back to Saskatoon. He asserts the primacy of his Canadian identity, yet Vanderhaeghe fails to give concrete shape or context to what this identity means in cultural terms. The second novel, The Last Crossing, downplays overt Canadian themes. The most innovative, ambitious and successful book in the trilogy, it is also the most American. Even though we learn at the novel’s conclusion that one of the characters has gone north and founded a successful ranch near Calgary, this is essentially a book about two upper-class brothers from England wandering through 1870s Montana in search of their missing third brother. The Faulknerian rotating narrative voices, each conveying a subjective view of events, make more demands on the reader than is customary in Vanderhaeghe’s fiction. The results are often compelling. The Last Crossing, which won the 2004 CBC Canada Reads derby, enlarged Vanderhaeghe’s international profile. The first printing of the US hardcover was 35,000 copies; in England, The Last Crossing was featured on a BBC-TV program that resembles Canada Reads. The recurring theme of gender ambiguity gave the novel a patina of contemporaneity, freeing it from the patriarchal stereotypes of the Western genre.
The third novel in the trilogy, A Good Man, unfurls its canvas along much of the Canada-U.S. border, from present-day Alberta all the way to Ontario. The formation of Canada is an undercurrent in The Last Crossing, discernible only by implication: to the extent that modern Canadian culture and institutions can be seen as the products of a collision between the overseas extension of Victorian Great Britain and late nineteenth-century United States expansionism. A Good Man, however, puts the political themes at the centre of the narration. The main protagonist, Wesley Case, is a renegade member of an Ottawa political family whose powerful father is an associate of John A. Macdonald. Having become an army officer at his father’s insistence, Case has committed an unnamed shameful act while defending Ontario against a Fenian raid. In an attempt to escape his own conscience, he drifts to Western Canada and then across the Medicine Line into Montana. The other man pulled into the love triangle that propels the novel’s action is also from the Ottawa area. Michael Dunne, a young Irishman who wanders off an Ottawa Valley farm, uses ruthless guile to claw his way up through the rigid class barriers of nineteenth-century Toronto. It is never made clear whether Dunne is an Irish Catholic or an Irish Protestant. At one point he spies on the Fenians for the Government of Canada; later he collaborates with these Catholic Irish-American terrorists who enjoy the support of US industrialists and politicians in their campaign to “liberate” British North America.
Case and Dunne compete for the affections of Ada Tarr, a cosmopolitan New Englander who has been reduced by widowhood to teaching school in Fort Benton, Montana. This boom town on the Missouri River is the fulcrum of each of the novels in the trilogy, yet in A Good Man it acquires greater centrality than in the first two volumes. When the action begins, Custer’s Last Stand has converted Fort Benton into the command post for hunting the Sioux, who have disappeared into the hills after their startling victory at the Little Bighorn. The crushing of Aboriginal civilization proceeds in tandem with the consolidation of the Canada-US border. The Sioux chief, Sitting Bull, leads his people across the Medicine Line into “British” land to escape the Americans. Like the fanatical Fenians, the great prairie warrior makes the mistake of seeing Canada as a colony of the “Old Woman” (Queen Victoria), when it is now an independent country ruled by the unscrupulous “Old Tomorrow” (John A. Macdonald). Vanderhaeghe portrays Macdonald’s decision to starve the Sioux into leaving Canadian territory and accepting humiliating exile on a reservation in the United States as one of the founding acts of the new nation. The love triangle among Case, Dunne and Ada Tarr is engaging, but the depiction of the destruction of Sitting Bull’s dignity is the novel’s most memorable achievement.
A Good Man may be a “literary Western,” in the style of Larry McMurtry or Cormac McCarthy, yet it conforms to genre expectations sufficiently that the love triangle is resolved with violence and gunplay. Vanderhaeghe manages these scenes adequately. Lacking McCarthy’s ability to create visions of terrifying carnage, he approaches violence with a reassuring, CBC-like tone that signals to the reader that everything will work out in the end. Vanderhaeghe’s real strength –arguably a strength more suited to narratives set in the present than to historical fiction– lies in his sensitive portrayals, leavened by irony, of the ways in which people torment and delude themselves over love and sex. The hormonal temperature is not as high, nor as deliciously perverse, in A Good Man as in The Last Crossing. Yet when, three-quarters of the way through the novel, Vanderhaeghe breaks away from the love triangle to deliver the big, set-piece flashback that reveals at last the shameful act committed by Case during the Fenian raid on Ontario, the reader feels distracted and impatient to return to the lovers in Fort Benton.
If Vanderhaeghe’s novels constitute a “border trilogy” (rather than a Fort Benton trilogy), the obvious point of comparison is with Cormac McCarthy’s trilogy about the border between the United States and Mexico. Both trilogies have a middle volume whose title includes the word “crossing”; both adopt a variety of postures concerning the relationship between the cultures that meet at the border. Vanderhaeghe begins where McCarthy ends, with the old cowboy Shorty McAdoo, out of place in the twentieth century, adrift in the Hollywood of the Roaring Twenties. His predicament resembles that of the displaced cowhands of Cities of the Plain (1998), the last book in McCarthy’s trilogy, whom modern society reduces to helpless vagrants. Yet, as is so often the case, the Canadian is wrestling with the problem of consolidating a national culture while the American, in order to say something original, must tear holes in a suffocating imperial mythology. McCarthy’s bilingual cowboys, who speak Spanish as easily as they do English, reflect a contemporary border consciousness. The great Chilean fabulist José Donoso was scathing about the Spanish dialogue in All the Pretty Horses (1992), the first book in McCarthy’s trilogy, denouncing it as a stereotype of Spanish diction that made Hispanics sound simple-minded. Yet, though the utterances in Spanish are short, McCarthy’s grammar is flawless, and sufficient dialogue is left untranslated to pose a challenge to unilingual English readers. McCarthy unravels American stereotypes of savage Mexico by bringing the country’s erudite culture into play. All the Pretty Horses may reinforce images of savagery in its relentless violence, but it also contains a lengthy disquisition on José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (1776-1827), author of the first Latin American novel. Like Vanderhaeghe, McCarthy puts his best book in the middle of the trilogy. The Crossing (1994) exhibits a nuanced treatment of Mexican-U.S. relations. References to Mexican high culture return in the novel’s overt literary allusions to Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955), often judged the greatest modern Mexican novel. McCarthy almost seems to be campaigning for the cataloguing of his own books as subsidiaries of the Latin American literary tradition
Deprived of the creative screen of a language barrier, and confronting a culture infinitely more powerful than his own, Vanderhaeghe faces a task that is more daunting because it is riskier and less easily defined. Where McCarthy campaigns to cross the boundary into another culture’s literary tradition, Vanderhaeghe cannot help but do so. His adoption of the US form of the Western has led most reviewers outside Canada to assume that he is an American. Both McCarthy’s and Vanderhaeghe’s trilogies respond, in different ways, to the drive for continental integration implemented by the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The Englishman’s Boy displays a residual 1970s Canadian nationalism, assertive yet vague about the nature of the cultural difference it is asserting. Harry Vincent’s reawakened Canadian consciousness contrasts with the ways in which the Aboriginal people divide up the world. At the novel’s close, Vanderhaeghe writes of Strong Bull: “All the country between the Missouri and the Saskatchewan was contained in his mind.” Where white people see a border, the Aboriginals experience a continuity. The hybridized characters of The Last Crossing, such as the half-Scottish half-Blackfoot guide Jerry Potts and Simon Gaunt, the Englishman who discovers that Aboriginal culture can accommodate his twin-spirited nature better than that of the Europeans, swing the ideological weathervane of Vanderhaeghe’s project. In A Good Man, the theme of the consolidation of Canadian nationhood, as the Medicine Line becomes an international border, persists; yet the ways in which this carving-out of nation states annihilates Aboriginal civilization emerges as the trilogy’s central thematic arc. The United States and Canada are distinguished only by their divergent approaches to crushing the Sioux and the Blackfoot. The Americans are frankly genocidal, while the Canadians, as one might expect, shroud their passive-aggressive nature beneath a pose of political rectitude. United by the history of destroying the original peoples of their land, these cultures converge. A Good Man concludes with a marriage between a Canadian and an American, and with the Canadian failing to understand a question asked of him by the defeated Sitting Bull. Having launched his career as a regionalist and started his border trilogy as a nationalist, Vanderhaeghe signs off on the final novel of the series with a subdued, ironic recognition of the triumph of continentalism.
McClelland & Stewart | 480 pages | $32.99 | cloth | ISBN #978-0771087400